Felix Salmon

from Barbara Kiviat:

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There's been some interesting discussion in response to my earlier post about why we expect too much from economists, although a lot of the comments miss my larger point. What I was trying to say is that economics might not entirely be up to the task of explaining what we generally consider to be economic phenomena because we are overconfident about what the discipline has the ability to account for. You might call this the Freakonomics Fallacy. Whatever it is in the world we are trying to explain—crime, climate change, test scores—economics has the answer.

from Justin Fox:

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1. The single most valuable and durable lesson of economics is that incentives matter. Monetary incentives don't always matter more than other motivations, and sometimes people's behavior regarding money is a little nutty. But as an organizing principle for a social science, incentives matter is pretty good.

from Barbara Kiviat:

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Over at the Curious Capitalist, my former colleague Steve Gandel asks me to react to this NYT article about how economists manage to disagree on such fundamental questions as whether the government should spend more or less money in response to economic malaise. I've been perplexed by this sort of thing before. In this post from August, I worried about the influence of ideology, and then decided that maybe the bigger take-away is that we should spend less time listening to economists, who, after all, represent just one possible lens onto the world of human behavior, decision-making and social dynamics: